Angela Saini has been hailed as one of the world’s greatest modern thinkers but how is this science journalist and author of The Patriarchs tackling misinformation and disinformation?
Transcript
Hi, I'm Dhruti Shah and this is my podcast Have You Thought About. I'm a writer who loves to find out about what passions people are pursuing, especially if they managed to blend together skills in unusual ways. In each edition, I'm going to chat with someone I find particularly interesting and someone who's managed to fit things together in their life or profession that you might not think of as an obvious match. You're about to hear me chatting with Angela Saini, a science journalist, author, and broadcaster.
Dhruti Shah:Hey, Angela. Now, it's wonderful to have you on the podcast, I know that you're incredibly busy. So thank you for finding the time. You are someone who it seems has a million things on the go yet is able to create really deeply researched, influential pivotal works to shift the way that people think about things was that always the intention?
Angela Saini:That's very kind to say, it wasn't always my intention. I used to work in news. And I realised quite quickly when I was working in news, and I'm more of a deep thinker, I like to spend a lot of time with a topic. And I find really complex things, the kinds of things I research, like a puzzle almost, you're like a detective, figuring out how the world works and how it's put together and investigating things. And I love that challenge. I live for it.
Dhruti Shah:You have this latest book out, it's called The Patriarchs: How Men Came To Rule. But it builds on a career where you rip apart conventional approaches. You've had previous books, including Geek Nation, Inferior and Superior, which all decode science through various ways; race science, concepts of gender biology. And for those that aren't quite familiar yet, with what drives you to tackle such meaty subjects, how do you approach all that work?
Angela Saini:I think one thing follows on from the previous one. So I got into Inferior, for instance, I wrote that after my son was born, and my background is in engineering. Until then, I tend to write about technology and physical sciences. But editors are asking me to do things on human biology and evolution, because people are fascinated by that. So I slowly got into understanding the world that way. And I was lucky academically, I've had a taste of both worlds, the sciences and the social sciences. So even though I studied engineering, when I was working at the BBC, I studied part time at the war Studies Department at King's, which is a very realist school. So it looks at the world in a slightly different way to the way some other universities look at it. And it helped me understand the social sciences and bring that to bear on my work as a journalist, and later as a science reporter, which really has been a theme of all my work throughout is trying to explain science to social scientists, and trying to explain social science to scientists. That's essentially all my work is.
Dhruti Shah:Isn't that sort of understating it because you say that, but your work also taps into popular culture, and it taps into these historical spaces. And it's not just for scientists, it is for anybody who has an interest in knowing where history comes from knowing where we could potentially be in the future.
Angela Saini:I would hope so because I'm a journalist. At the end of the day, I'm not an academic. So even though most of the books I read are academic books, so you know, if you could see my desk right now, the stacks that I've got here, most of the books in the stacks are from academic presses. But the problem is that much of this is written for other academics. So it'll be written in language that everyday people won't understand it won't be fully accessible to people who just want to understand about race, or just want to ask very simple questions about what is race, what's gender? How do patriarchy come about? And I guess, obviously, as a journalist, my job is to speak to that, and this speak to the masses, right from across the board. But I do find, especially with Inferior and Superior, those works have been really useful for academics as well and scientists. So I'm kind of straddling two worlds. And I like that, I'd like to be able to speak to both.
Dhruti Shah:And you mentioned earlier, it seems like every idea you break through leads to that other path or other route, but how do you manage not to end up in this rabbit hole of ideas and paths? How are you able to order things and think like, actually, no, this is the path I'm going to pursue for this book, or this is what I'm going to use elsewhere. Like, it's a lot of information, how do you not get overloaded?
Angela Saini:It takes time, and it happens very gradually. So for example, I get a lot of people contacting me with book ideas and asking me, you know, can you put me in touch with an agent? How do you go about this? Most of the time, they will not have spent as long as I spent on my book proposals. I spent a year sometimes. So the book posts I'm working on now I've been working on for a year. I've read dozens of books already, just to understand my thoughts, organise my thoughts around it, and it takes that long to systematically try and distil exactly what it is that I'm trying to say to get all these different pieces together and try to make them make sense in my head. And that's to say and actually how each of my books are written before, even before they're commissioned and actually start the work of writing them, I will have spent years collecting little bits of information, trying to figure out how it fits together, whether there is a book there or an article or something else. Because there are lots of things I'm fascinated by that I don't particularly want to write a full book about, or maybe it's not worth writing a full book about. But I can explore in a documentary or in a feature somewhere, or even a book review somewhere. It's just about being a magpie, and collecting all these little bits and pieces. And after a while, they start to coalesce. And then if you're lucky, then it starts to form a kind of cohesive idea, but you still have to have an argument behind that idea, it still has to have legs. And it's the case even now that occasionally I read books where you know that someone had an idea, but they didn't flesh it out before they started writing about it. And so the book will taper off. You know, I'm sure you've had this experience, if you read a book, and it sounds really good at the beginning. And then suddenly, the argument just kind of dissolves. And it doesn't start to making sense after a while, or it isn't as powerful
Angela Saini:anymore. Well, there's only really one good example, that to hold up the argument. And I think the job of book writing is really to be sure that you have enough there to really make a solid case for what you're trying to say. You said
Dhruti Shah:Magpie like where's your nest? Where do you put all this? Is it a big spreadsheet? Is it lots of post it notes? Like how do
Angela Saini:No I'm not a post it person, I don't have a huge amounts of space, I just have one desk, which at the moment is at the end of the living room, I read a lot. I put post it notes and sticky notes in books. And I'm reading and I always have a big pile of books that I'm reading, I keep lots of things in folders on my desktop on my computer. And I always keep a notebook. So every book proposal that I'm writing, I have a notebook, and I write everything down in there. I do most things by hand, if I'm honest, I prefer it that way. I'm quite old fashioned.
Dhruti Shah:But isn't because there's a reason for it to like the you know, help it stay in the brain more?
Angela Saini:Yeah I find the act of writing with a pen or pencil just organises my thoughts better. And also, you can be diagrammatical that way you can have, you know, arrows pointing here, you can move things around, you can cross things out. I like that. Now,
Dhruti Shah:I'm just gonna stick with the patriarchs for now, if that was all right, it seems that one of the key things you want it for the audience to take away is that nothing is definite. And finally, especially with patriarchal societies, but is there anything that you found surprising in terms of the audience response to the ideas that you've been positing?
Angela Saini:Well, occasionally that, like with my previous books, there's been a lot of pushback at the beginning. And then the ideas become mainstream, and then there's no pushback at all. And then you actually see loads of similar books coming out. And you realise that your ideas are completely mainstream by then, with The Patriarchs, there hasn't really been much pushback. And I think it's been well received by historians and academics as well as by journalists. And I think that's partly because I don't write polemics. I'm not writing arguments, I'm not being strident. I'm really just genuinely, as a journalist going out there and trying to understand trying to answer a question as faithfully as possible, and not closing any doors along the way. So I leave open the possibility, for instance, that patriarchy could have some biological component. That's not really the argument that I'm making. But I don't want to close that altogether. Because we just don't know I want to leave that open for readers. But at the same time, I want to be able to say, what else is there other than biology that can explain the social systems that we're in why the world is organised the way it is, because if you're just leaning on one explanation, which we're really tempted to do as humans, we like to think that there is just one explanation that can account for everything that can tie everything up in a bow, and make it easy for us. And I still get emails from people. I just got one yesterday, from a reader in the Netherlands saying that, you know, have you thought about maternal mortality? Maybe that could be a reason that we don't have matriarchal societies, that women for a long time, were always dying in large numbers in childbirth, and I didn't consider it to a great degree, partly because I think, I'm not sure how big a factor maternal mortality is to gender and power. But you know, everyone has their folk ideas about things and I don't want to close anything
Angela Saini:off. I want to leave everything open and investigated in a fair way, without being derogatory or dismissive. patronising, and I think that's something people generally appreciate in my work is that I'm not talking down to people where they are, and I'm writing it from their point of view.
Dhruti Shah:You said with The Patriarchs, it's generally had quite a good reception or positive reception, but that wasn't necessarily the case with Superior and Inferior in terms of people taking what you've created and not always being particularly nice about it and using it in various ways. As an author have you had to learn that you need to put in protective measurements in the world that we're operating now, when you're putting ideas out there that won't always be received in the most positive way by all members of society,
Angela Saini:Of course, and I thought about that a lot when I was writing inferior. When I wrote that book, I knew that I had to write it in such a way that it would appeal to even the most misogynistic, sexist of people. Because if I couldn't convince them, then how was I going to convince everybody else of what I was writing, so it's very heavily reference. And believe it or not, now, usually between hardback and paperback coming out, there will be corrections, I was so meticulous with that book that there wasn't any corrections between the hardback and paperback coming out, it was so careful. And I think that's why it was well received in the scientific community is because, and especially by women scientists, because they appreciated a work of feminism written the way a scientist would write a work of feminism, everything was evidenced nothing in there was speculative. And I could have been speculative, I could have put in things about areas of science that are just theoretical at the moment that were for which we do not have very good data, or we don't have good evidence, but I didn't want to do that I really just put in what we genuinely genuinely do know and interrogate that, within theory, it was fine. The only real pushback I got was from those, you know, at that time, you have to remember, me came out in 2017, Trump had just been elected. And there hadn't really been much of a literature taking the perspective that I was taking, which is that there are sexist elements of science. Now we're so used to hearing that, you know that science can be sexist that medicine can be sexist. People say that all the time. But people weren't saying that at that time. And so of course, there are a lot of people for whom science was rational, objective and truthful, who really took exception to this idea that scientists could be anything other than that, that they could be political or prejudice. But of course, in time, that idea has been challenged, a
Angela Saini:lot of books have been written, challenging that. And of course, that has always been in the social sciences, already, there's been lots of social science work, looking at perspectives in science, if you read Donna Haraway's work, for instance, you know, so much literature that examines bias, and what academics sometimes called positionality. I'm really nervous about using academic terms when I when I talk, but you know, just your point of view, and how that shapes how you understand the world and the theories you come up with and the data you collect. And that is much more mainstream in popular culture now. And certainly scientists are much more aware of it, but believe it or not, in 2017, it didn't feel that way. I think the book won people over and that's why it's still selling well.
Angela Saini:And with Superior, the backlash really was just from white supremacists, there was a small cabal of far right thinkers, white supremacist, who were active in academia, I mean, a couple of them have died. But some of them have lots of positions at certain universities, and are still pushing this idea that it's really a conspiracy theory, you know, this idea that black people are less intelligent than white people that the you know, they push ideas around great replacement and other things. And they really came after me in a big way.
Angela Saini:And that's a reason I'm not on Twitter or Facebook anymore is because they doxed me, they put all my personal information online, they put my parents names, my son who was six or seven at the time, they put his name online, they tried to psychologically analyse me, there was even an entire Twitter thread that was trying to gauge my skin colour, because then they said that would tell them how intelligent I was that it was darker, I must have a lower IQ. And if I was had lighter skin, then I must have a higher IQ. So that's the kind of inane stuff I had to put up with when Superior came out. But that was marginal, you know, I think mainstream inferior and superior have been over the moon at how people have embraced them, and they've become part of university with reading this have become part of how we now think about science.
Dhruti Shah:There was a campaign to made sure they got into all schools and got into reading lists, like when you see that element of bridge, building a community building, especially when what could have been quite a lonely position, because you're at the vanguard of something, you're creating unconventional ideas, you're creating something that's different to what was going on at the time. How did that make you feel that people were so supportive that they were really creating action and not just saying go and buy in the bookshop? They were literally making sure that it was going to be used as an educational tool and taking action to create that movement.
Angela Saini:Well, I have to give a lot of credit to Jess Wade. So Jess is a material scientist at Imperial College, and a really remarkable person. And I didn't know her before, when I started doing events for inferior, she kept coming to them and I thought this is odd this woman just I keep seeing her. So I didn't know who she was. I just knew that she was a fan of the book, and then I got to know her. And she was just this really remarkable person who in a very practical way wanted to change the way that women were treated in the sciences, and which we know can be really appalling. There's a high attrition rate of women in the sciences, even though they're, you know, increasingly well represented at the undergraduate level, they peter out as you get higher, because of abuse and harassment, sexual harassment, and discrimination, and these long standing stereotypes about what women can and can't do. And I think for her Inferior was a bit of ammunition in that fight, you know, to be able to say, women can do exactly what men are doing intellectually, just look at this, you know, this provides that information. And she took it on herself with some other women scientists to launch a crowdfunding campaign. And within two weeks, she had raised all the money, she needed to get a copy into every secondary school in the UK, so it was going to start with girls schools, and then it just became every secondary school. And I had nothing to do with it. I can't claim any credit for that whatsoever, because she did that by herself. And she's done so much other brilliant work elevating women, scientists, minority scientists, LGBTQ scientists, writing, I mean, she's most famous for the Wikipedia pages that she writes, for people who are underrepresented within the sciences just to because we compete her is such an important source for many of us. You know, it's the first place many people go, when they're researching something, the Wikipedia entry is the first thing. So
Angela Saini:it's really important, then, even if it's not always the most reliable place to get information that at least it's a source, and a valuable source. And she's written all these hundreds and hundreds of Wikipedia pages for people. And she's inspired others to do the same. So many women's scientists around the world wherever I travel, Australia, Canada, India, anywhere in the world that I go, people know who just wait is because she is that kind of everyday hero. She's just a wonderful, wonderful person.
Dhruti Shah:I want to come back to you because I think this is actually linked. One of the things you're incredibly passionate about is cutting through misinformation. Now you're the founder and chair of the challenging pseudoscience group at the Royal Institution, which is an independent charity that connects people through science. What is the intent of what you're up to with this?
Angela Saini:I founded the challenging pseudoscience group in 2019, after Superior came out, because I wasn't the only one who was facing this kind of weird pushback from these far right, white supremacists, pseudo academics online. There are many other people who were suffering those same problems, not just journalists, but academics, social media, experts, policymakers, lots of people. And so I put out a call on social media for people who wanted to do something about this. And loads of people replied, and I got some of them together to form this kind of informal network. And the Royal Institution very kindly agreed to host us, we sit under the one institution now, the Open Society Foundations have given us very, very generous funding, but you won't find us online, we work under the radar funding projects that try to bridge these divides and try to understand why is it that people fall for scientific misinformation online, what we can do to make sure that people have accurate access to good information that isn't to say that we're in favour of restricting freedom of speech or anything like that. It's just that, you know, the internet is a wild west, there's a lot of nonsense out there, conspiracy theories abound. And it's very easy to get sucked into rabbit holes, whoever you are, and all of us will have been exposed to this, whether it's on WhatsApp or Facebook, or Twitter or wherever it is. It's a real problem. And it can be an existential problem in 2019, our group was already talking about the fact that health misinformation could be a security risk. And then the COVID pandemic happened, and we realised it was that's when misinformation really became a buzzword. Everybody knows what it is now misinformation, decision information, but we wanted to get on the front edge of that. So we funded lots of different things, talks, projects, probably the most valuable thing I think we've done is trying to understand why people are drawn to scientific
Angela Saini:conspiracy theories or pseudo scientific conspiracy theories, is not as simple as just fact checking. And I think this is sometimes the mistakes that editors and journalists make is that we think, okay, if people just have access to good information, they'll make the right choice. That's not how it works. The reason people, for instance, are scared about getting vaccinated is very often not to do with the fact that they don't have access to good information. They're as able to go to the NHS or CDC website or WHO website as anyone else. Of course, it's because they have some emotional fear or some other reason for feeling the way they do it. So a couple of years ago, we funded a detailed nationally representative ethnographic survey of vaccine hesitancy in the UK. This took a very long time, it's detailed, it involves sitting down with a lot of people for a very long period of time, including in their own homes. And what we learned from that was that there was no demographic that was necessarily more likely to be vaccine hesitant than others. This crosses all boundaries. But what we did find that vaccine hesitant people had in common, was a mistrust of authority, which is perfectly understandable.
Angela Saini:Because if you know, for instance, the government is having locked down parties when it's telling you to be in lockdown. All of us are going to be a little bit mistrustful to some extent. And also they have a fear of losing bodily autonomy. How do you keep yourself your bodily integrity, your bodily keep yourself safe under this fear that you are ceding control of your body to somebody else. So we did this research and those findings, then, one of our members is a very prominent YouTuber, Abigail Thorne, Philosophy Tube, so you can look up Philosophy Tube online, and she had recently undergone gender transition. And so she used that transitioning experience as a lens through which to present to her viewers or listeners, this very long, detailed argument around why it was still useful to get the vaccine even though you're scared about bodily autonomy, because she could understand firsthand what that felt like. And her audience spans the gamut. You know, it's not just people on the left, it's people who also watch Sam Harris, it's people who also read Jordan Peterson, so it's right across the board. And that was incredibly effective, that videos had more than a million views. And immediately, we could see in the comments, people who were scared to get the vaccine saying, I'm going to get the vaccine now, because we're engaging with their fundamental fears. It is fear that drives conspiracy theories, it's fear that drives political polarisation, scientific mistrust. And you have to engage with those fears. You can't dismiss them as stupid or irrational. Because when you are afraid, it feels perfectly rational to you, someone telling you you're stupid, or you don't know better is not going to help you in that circumstance. So we engaged with the fundamental reason that people were feeling this way. And that actually worked. So for me, as someone who works in this space around scientific misinformation, that is a promising avenue is that
Angela Saini:sometimes there is a lot of arrogance among scientists and the media, about why people believe the things that they do, we very rarely reach out and try to understand them where they are. And also, we very rarely understand our own blind spots. You know, what are we failing to appreciate? Maybe we are in our own rabbit holes, maybe we have been sucked into our own conspiracy theories. It's not as though conspiracy theories don't exist on the left or on the progressive left as well, they do. But you just don't see them when you're on the inside. So as a journalist, I think it's incredibly important for us to have some humility here. And just meet people where they are and understand them understand each other with empathy, rather than arrogance.
Dhruti Shah:And I don't want any humility here at all, because you've been named as one of the world's top thinkers. Prospect magazine gave you the accolade you have this engineering background, you've studied science security, you're interested in tackling disinformation misinformation. But what is it like to be considered as primarily a thinker when clearly you're a doer, and you're creating change?
Angela Saini:I don't know. I think I am still really just a thinker. It's just that what I want is for people to read my work and change the way they think about themselves and change the way they think about the world a bit. Because that's really what my work does. For me. When I start writing a book, I very rarely know what it's going to say, I am learning along with everybody else. I'm researching along with everybody else. And every single book I've written has changed my life to some degree. And especially I think, The Patriarchs, it's completely re taught me about power, the way that power works status. It's made me revisit so much of my own life and the lives of people that I know, and see it in a completely different context. And that's really what I want for the people is that they can have a bit of that if possible. That's my dream, but they will be able to read it and also feel that.
Dhruti Shah:You're doing so much. There's so much thinking in this so much changing the world. What does Angela do to relax and you're not chasing? What do you do for your downtime?
Angela Saini:I spent quite a lot of time relaxing if I'm honest, because I am one of these people that works in really fever bursts so I can get a lot done in a very short space of time. And then I take nice ample time off. So I usually take a chunk of the summer off every year. My son whenever he has a school holidays often spend that time with him. So just this two weeks, I've taken off to spend with him, take him to museums, I love. I love modern art, contemporary art, particularly, but I also love taking my son to museums and galleries. I love the theatre. I don't get to go as much as I would like right now because we moved to New York a few years ago and it's so expensive, it is much more expensive. And then in London, that's one of the things I miss about London is it used to be able to go to the National Theatre for a tenner. If you can't quickly you can't do that. And I love to read obviously, I love my work I don't feel like my work is work and I take quite a few holidays if I can. Lots of trips this year love video games as well.
Dhruti Shah:Angela Saini, a thinker, doer and a world changer. Do you have an interdisciplinary life because I would love to hear from you. And perhaps we can chat in this podcast that goes in my newsletter, which is called Have You Thought about and can be found via www.dhrutishah.com. Please join me next time for a fascinating conversation with another guest who likes to mix up lots of things in their life. Do listen to past episodes and rate and review the podcast if you've enjoyed it. And thank you to Rian Shah for the music